Get the Popcorn! Mississippi Primary Edition

The aftermath of yesterday’s upset win by Thad Cochran in yesterday’s Republican primary is sure to be richly entertaining. Two additional points: 1)it says something that “being a Republican party-liner who doesn’t favor randomly shutting down the government” is enough to make one a pariah to the Tea Party (or, as the all-skree-all-the-time Jeff Goldstein would put it for some reason, “TEA Party”); 2)the fact that noting that a candidate will not vote to eliminate basic government benefits is considered “race-baiting” by many conservatives is an excellent illustration of why 10% of the African American vote is a benchmark the national Republican Party is unlikely to reach for the foreseeable future.

That second point is huge. It’s actually really easy for Republicans to do better with black voters. Not great, but better. The problem is they have a lot of racists in their base who won’t let them.

Denverite

You know, you could tell a story whereby the decline of the national GOP is a direct result of the increasing impossibility of having to convince Rust Belt, Midwestern and Western suburban white voters that they’re not a bunch of racists, while at the same time, signalling to Southern voters that they are.

NonyNony

Eh. They have to convince some Rust Belt, Midwestern and Western suburban white voters that they’re not a bunch of racists. For others it’s actually fundamental to their Republican votes and “immigration” is one of their pet code words for hiding it from their fellow Republicans who only hate poor people and don’t actually give a rat’s ass about race.

Chet Manly

Yeah, probably more accurate to say “having to convince Rust Belt, Midwestern and Western suburban white voters that they’re only racist about Arabs and Mexicans.”

Anonymous

Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, and Philadelphia are examples of racism against blacks being a core suburban Republican value.

Incontinentia Buttocks

George Wallace drew huge crowds of future “Reagan Democrats” in the Rust Belt in 1968.

Jim Crow was a Southern thing. Racism was — and is — an American thing (though, of course, by no means exclusively).

tsol

Jim Crow was a Progressive Thing, thanks or segregating the Federal government goes to Prog hero Woodrow Wilson.

Aimai

So true: they doubled the Republican black population when they added Herman Cain to Alan Keyes.

Theobald Smith

Clarence Thomas, and so’s his wife.

Theobald Smith

*ex-wife

rea

Virginia Thomas isn’t black. And I have not seen anything to suggest that the first Mrs. Thomas was a Republican

So-in-so

Michael Steele, Colin Powell (until he voted for Obama), Rice, West…

Sadly, we could hope to name them all although probably not count them on our fingers.

DrDick

AS much as I like to beat on racist conservatives, that is not the only factor at work here, though it is significant. A lot of these folks are also profoundly anti-government and want to eliminate all government spending that does not benefit them or the military industrial complex (which they love for some obscure reason).

drkrick

But isn’t that largely because government spending that doesn’t benefit them or the MIC might go to brown people? It’s still racism all the way down.

Yeah, this. Being opposed to government spending is very deeply connected to racism.

In recent years, though, Republican opposition to “government spending” does seem to have metastasized a bit and gotten out of control.

DrDick

I think that is most of it, but I think for a lot of them it is less about people of color than poor people generally, whom they see as all equally shiftless and lazy. I say this from having grown up in hillbilly country.

This is what my GOP sister-in-law says, but I’m not really seeing the GOP rhetoric vs poor whites. And Chris McDaniel was certainly not focused on white Dems who voted for Cochran.

Manny Kant

Hillbillies have been voting Republican for at least the last 15 years or so. Some of them have been voting Republican since the Civil War.

tsam

I heard part of crazypants’ not-concession speech, in which he excoriated Cochran for “reaching across the aisle”.

Epic whiny tantrum from a Loser McLoserson.

catclub

I hope that sulk carries over to the general and allows Childers to steal a win. I doubt it will happen.

I also think that the black voters who were motivated to vote against McDaniel in this runoff would be even MORE motivated in the fall to vote against him, but not so much voting against Cochran. So Cochran gets re-elected and resigns within a year, and Haley Barbour is the new senator.

I hope to be proved wrong.

Anonymous

The MS Democratic Party chair has apparently decided the best course of action is to egg McDaniels on from a distance.

“They or their representative can come inspect the contents of any box and make notes of any irregularities and once they compile whatever evidence they may have, then they present a challenge to the Republican State Executive Committee,” Cole said. “Then the Republican State Executive Committee would have to rule on it, and if either party was dissatisfied by the Republican State Executive Committee ruling you would appeal it to a circuit court and it would be heard de novo in the circuit court—which means the circuit court would look at everything the Republican executive committee did just so you don’t have to start completely from the start….”

sharculese

that was me

the post, not the chair of the MS Dems

sharculese

Travis Childers is the pro-GENDERFRAUD candidate, tho.

catclub

It is amazingly obvious concern-troll advice, but McDaniel might be dumb enough to follow it.

I’ve gathered that McDaniel does not appreciate my (tactical) vote for him. Ingrate!

Jordan

I saw you said that you did that on crooked timber also. Was McDaniels really at risk to lose in the general?

mds

Was McDaniels really at risk to lose in the general?

Unlike Anderson, I’m not on the ground in Mississippi, but I’d suspect not. However, with McDaniel the chance became non-zero, if only by a miniscule amount. So given that on most substantive issues likely to come up between now and 2017, Cochran and McDaniel would have a virtually indistinguishable voting record, why not let the dice fly? (Yes, McDaniel would have been likelier to vote to destroy the full faith and credit of the United States, like the Constitution-hating asswipe he is, but I’m still guardedly optimistic that Congress would continue to blink first on that one.)

This. McDaniel was outpolling Childers, but hardly anyone statewide had any sense who Childers was; his #s would have climbed. And there was always a good chance McDaniel would get caught on tape saying something appalling.

Frankly, I’m a little disappointed that so many Miss. Dems appear to have bought the Tea Party’s line that McDaniel was materially different from Cochran.

OTOH, after McDaniel having insisted for months that Cochran is “liberal,” why is he so surprised that he scared the liberals into voting for Cochran?

Duvall

Okay, but McDaniel has spent more than a decade signaling as hard as he could that he has real resentments towards African-Americans and other minorities. Is it really a surprise that they took McDaniel seriously enough to cut off any chance of having him in the U.S. Senate?

Jenny, I continue to not get why you obsess over people using partial asterisks in words. Of all the shallow things you fixate on to cover up for your lack of a point, this is by far the most childish. Adults don’t think they’re important for swearing in public, full stop. And I’m saying this as someone who uses fuck as a punctuation mark.

Feel free to call me a pussy if it makes you feel any better. It will confirm everything I think of you and also I will be laughing at you heartily.

tsam

Shut the fuck up you dumbshit.

sharculese

Nah let him talk. Talk is cheap and I prefer we give him enough airtime to make it clear just how vapid his worldview is.

tsam

I know–but I have a hard time letting bullshit like that go unanswered. I need to stop playing along.

sharculese

Look at it this way: if Jenny is here shrieking his id at us, he’s not bothering normal people.

We’re basically heroes.

mark f

I believe “TEA” stands for “Taxed Enough Already.” That’s what I recall on every sign protesting Barack Obama’s running up of the national debt between Nov. 4, 2008, and Jan. 20, 2009.

sharculese

Sure, they pretended it stood for the for about 5 minutes. That doesn’t make it less sad that Godlstein is still trying to make it a thing.

FMguru

Back then they also proudly refered to themselves as “Teabaggers”, up until they figured out why everyone else was laughing so hard at that.

DAS

People think it’s the “Tea Party” referring to the events in Boston oh so many years ago. But it’s really the TEA (triethanolamine) party, referring to their favorite pH buffer system for hair/skin-care products.

Pee Cee

I was driving home the other day behind a vanity pickup truck with two bumper stickers:

1) “TEA: Taxed Enough Already!”
2) “FIX OUR ROADS!”

I can only conclude that this Tea Partier expects the magic road fairies to fix the roads for free.

Davis X. Machina

Come the glorious Day, the potholes will be filled cost-free by chain gangs of humanities professors and welfare recipients.

NonyNony

In conservatarian free-market paradise everyone will own a chunk of road and be responsible for maintaining it themselves – paid for out of the toll they charge for its usage.

(I’d say the above is a Poe or a straw man, but it’s pretty much word for word the “solution” given to me by my Republican brother when I called him out for complaining about his minimal state taxes that he does everything he can to not pay while also complaining about the state of the roads in the area miles away from civilization that he’s chosen to live to keep his tax rate low. Needless to say I LOLed.)

cpinva

so, if I understand your bro’s “solution”, everyone will own one square foot of road, which they will be responsible for maintaining, using money from the tolls they collect. how will anyone actually move on these roads, once they’ve left their driveway? there will be a toll booth every foot.

I know, minor details.

Autonomous Coward

I think the assumption would be that some sort of private highway department would emerge. It is unclear how this would be that much better than an actual highways department.

While it seems like this would ignore the start-up costs you have to remember that market fetishists don’t understand collective action problems, or externalities, or natural monopolies.

As a bicyclist who lives on a busy street, I plan applying caltrops liberally to my section. Two wheels good, four wheels bad.

herr doktor bimler

How do your liberal caltrops differ from the conservative ones?

Ahuitzotl

they work

Conservative caltrops dont have spikes, to keep the cost down.

mark f

1) “TEA: Taxed Enough Already!”
2) “FIX OUR ROADS!”

“What do you drink the T FOR?”

UserGoogol

It’s exceptionally likely that that person is in fact incoherent in their policy desires, but I wouldn’t interpret that bumper sticker to mean tax revenue should go down to zero, but just that taxes should be lowered. The general idea is that if you cut “waste fraud and abuse” and “government handouts” you’d be able to provide the government services that they care about on radically reduced tax revenue. It’s likely that the “do only the things I want the government to do” budget wouldn’t actually be feasible, but it’s not self-contradictory on its face.

Matt

I always find it hilarious that somehow, building & maintaining a $1 million / mile modern road to service the two dozen denizens of Lesser Redneckistan is never counted as a “handout”, despite the fact that (taken on its own, P&L style) the road is nearly entirely subsidized by gas taxes paid in cities…

cpinva

“I always find it hilarious that somehow, building & maintaining a $1 million / mile modern road to service the two dozen denizens of Lesser Redneckistan is never counted as a “handout”, despite the fact that (taken on its own, P&L style) the road is nearly entirely subsidized by gas taxes paid in cities…”

not necessarily true. the useful life of a one lane- mile road is 7 years, if it’s just straight asphalt, with no additives. unless only those two dozen denizens of Lesser Redneckistan use it, the actual capitalized cost will be spread out among friends/family/mailperson/delivery persons/etc. that also use that road. also, factor in people who get lost on it, never to be seen or heard from again. their vehicles/bodies are worth something on the open market.

of course, this pretty much destroys the whole “libertarian” argument too. the only place that a true libertarian society can possibly work, is on a not quite desert island, with one libertarian living his dream on it.

wjts

“Keep those flat-footed goombahs in Washington out of my hair – hurry up with my federal bail-out check.”

I enjoyed the irony of a pickup truck at one of the trailheads at Capital Reef National Park with some tea party/anti-tax bumper stickers.

Cheap Wino

I think the idea is you don’t need to raise taxes to fix the roads but reallocate the money that is being wasted on the poors and the blahs — the obviously lazy freeloaders who deserve nothing — to projects that benefit me, me, me, me, me! Makes perfect sense. If you’re a borderline sociopathic asshole Republican voter.

mark f

I believe “TEA” stands for “Taxed Enough Already.” That’s what I recall on every sign protesting Barack Obama’s running up of the national debt between Nov. 4, 2008, and Jan. 20, 2009.

RogerAiles

In Godlstein’s case it’s “Tug Excessively, Angrily.”

benjoya

ha!

Warren Terra

Sure. The point is, why is Goldstein capitalizing every letter, which both makes it look ugly and reduces the allusion to the Boston rebels against British taxation? Because, yes, you do sometimes capitalize every letter of an acronym – but it looks jarring, and it’s not what most people do nowadays when they write “Tea Party”.

I would offer the suggestion that it’s about machismo, about Gay Panic. Goldstein is infamous for his macho posing, to such an exaggerated degree that you suspect he’s deathly afraid someone, sometime might take him to be even slightly less than completely heterosexual in his inclinations. The sort of absurd, panicked poseur who defiantly chews broken glass in his cup because to chew crushed ice might be somehow girly. I think he’s stressing “TEA Party” because in his deranged mind he fears that if he were to affiliate with a “Tea Party” petticoats and mincing would soon follow (and that this would be a disaster).

Mark Centz

More likely it’s an artifact of all-all caps worldview.
Oops, I mean
MORE LIKELY IT’S ABOUT THE YELLING.
TEA, DAMMIT.

herr doktor bimler

I particularly liked the part where Godlstein states his intention of purging the Big Tent until only the clowns are left. This being his petulant response to the irrefutable proof that his views have no influence in the Republican movement.

howard

There was a 50th anniversary of freedom summer that took place this weekend and an acquaintance of mine who was there said the irony of timing did not go unnoticed.

jim, some guy in iowa

if Cantor hadnt pretty much thrown himself out of office the tea partiers wouldn’t have had much high-profile success…

DAS

How long before the Tea party blames voter fraud (i.e. because you know who voted in this primary)? Added ironic deliciousness would occur if Tea Partiers have, in the past, agitated for open primaries.

tsam

He already went there. Cochran appealed to black voters and managed to pull out a win. We all know that any black person voting is objectively fraudulent.

sharculese

pre-emptively.

True the Vote loudly announced that they were sending in ‘observers,’ a thing that is apparently not actually legal in MS.

Aimai

Kay over at Balloon Juice, who handles Ohio politics, has some amazing stories about how clueless these national groups, like True the Vote, are about the actual rules governing who can see or do what near a polling place. And IIRC Ace of Spades’ own experience of working for the Romney Campaign revealed that even during a major Presidential election most of these groups and volunteers are simply incapable of handling the details of filing the paperwork to be permitted to observe, let alone challenge, any given voter.

sharculese

Kay (and the rest of Balloon Juice’s stable of topic-specific experts) are really just a fantastic resource.

Anonymous

Deregulate Vote Truing!

H. Rumbold, Master Barber

Where True is defined as “voting conservative/GOP/white guy”, unlike the dude in WI, who totally doesn’t apply.

The Obama campaign wasn’t perfect at this either – I was supposed to be a poll observer on election day in 2012, but the Obama campaign here in Philly didn’t get its act together and didn’t have credentials for me. They told me to go to the polling place anyway, which I did, but the election officials basically said I couldn’t stay without credentials and kicked me out.

The level of organization required for this kind of thing is enormous.

Pee Cee

How long before the Tea party blames voter fraud (i.e. because you know who voted in this primary)?

Before the results were even in?

DAS

Added ironic deliciousness would occur if Tea Partiers have, in the past, agitated for open primaries.

Ironically, voting records show McDaniel crossed party lines in 2003 to vote in the Democratic primary.

McDaniel initially denied doing so, but a spokesman later conceded the candidate had in order to “have a choice in local competitive races.”

Also from that article (related to my first point):

Supporters suggested that Democrats who voted for Cochran had committed voter fraud.

“Every Democrat who voted for Cochran yesterday while intending to vote for Childers in November broke the law. That’s fraud,” said Bryan Fischer, of the American Family Association. “If Democrats broke the law when they voted for Cochran, that’s voter fraud and this is in fact a stolen election.”

How can that even be enforceable? How could it pass constitutional muster to require someone to intend to vote a certain way in a future election to be allowed to vote in a given election?

Brandon

I’m going to guess that Bryan Fischer is an uninformed moron talking out of his ass.

Ken

He has a history of that, yes.

herr doktor bimler

You misspelled “career”.

ChrisTS

Not to mention the question as to who is being defrauded.

cleter

Voting for one guy in the primary and another guy in the general is not voter fraud. Good lord.

wjts

Didn’t Limbaugh or some other right-wing media blowhard cook up something with a name like “Operation: BADGER HAVOC” in 2008 that encouraged republican voters in states with open primaries to vote for Clinton as part of some convoluted plan to damage Obama?

joe from Lowell

So, are things going to get back to relatively normal when the President isn’t a black guy anymore?

Malaclypse

If by “normal” you mean 8 years of investigations into Vince Foster and the Mena Airport, yes.

jim, some guy in iowa

will it be a bad thing to make money on the futures market again, too?

joe from Lowell

Sadly enough, yes. I do.

Tom Servo

Maybe this time Slick Willy will get a handy from another intern and they’ll find some excuse to re appoint Special Blowjob Investigator Ken Starr and impeach HRC for that.

I don’t know–this teabagger thing might be the first perpetual motion machine. The shootings, fraud and psychosis seems to be increasing their numbers rather than reducing them.

Tom Scudder

Assuming Clinton is president, maybe we can trade in some of the cartoonish racism for cartoonish sexism. Not that there’s not already plenty of that going around. (Peak wingnut continues to be a lie.)

No, they are not. Politics in the US have been fundamentally changed. The campaign finance rules that restrained the worst excesses of the conservatives are a tattered remnant of their former selves. The party is now deeply in thrall to megalomaniac billionaires, their pet superPACs and their “everything for the rich”, and “government itself is illegitimate” agenda. The Tea Party is now a self perpetuating carnival of cynical carnival barkers and ignorant gullible hateful rubes. The internet and cable news are a finely tuned machine for spreading propaganda and misinformation and for stirring up resentment against the enemy du jour. Conservatives have added punishment of their political enemies to their previous main goal of plunder. The future is going to be a rough ride on unmaintained roads.

Eric k

There is also the great irony that the reason Mississippi has open primaries is because the Reps wanted the votes from the Dixie-crats. So it isn’t crossover votes that they object to, it is cross over votes from the wrong people…

Murc

I’m continually surprised at the presence of open primaries and jungle primaries. They seem like things that are both relics of an earlier time AND would have a rare bipartisan consensus that they should be gotten rid of; nobody likes the other side coming in and fucking with their stuff.

For the record, I’m against open primaries in principle. Pick a fucking team. And I’m especially against tactical crossover voting in open primaries; I loathe the Republican Party and everything it stands for, but I do think they have the right for only actual, you know, Republicans to decide who bears their standard. I know I’d be royally pissed off if I lived in an open primary state and Republicans kept crossing lines to fuck us over.

NonyNony

If we had a parliamentary system, I’d be fine with primaries as they are.

As we don’t have a parliamentary system, I’d prefer the California style primary system (I assume that’s what you mean by “jungle primary”) because I think it gets closer to giving you candidates that actually represent what the voters actually want, rather than what the hardcore partisans want in their candidates and forcing voters to figure out which one is the least bad.

Murc

As we don’t have a parliamentary system, I’d prefer the California style primary system (I assume that’s what you mean by “jungle primary”) because I think it gets closer to giving you candidates that actually represent what the voters actually want

Except that’s not the point of a primary. A primary is a method by which a political party decides who they want to present to the voters in an election. It isn’t an election itself, and frankly, I don’t like the degree to which the states are involved in it already; political parties are private organizations, not arms of the state, and if they wanted to decide who will run on their ticket by, say, holding a dance-off, they should be allowed to do so. Eligibility for the ballot should be decided simply on base of support, and the floor should be quite low, sub-five percent if I had my way.

Ascertaining what the preferences of the voters at large are is for the election. If you’re going to try and offload gauging the wishes of the electorate into the primary, why have a primary?

Tom Servo

I think you’re getting a little too caught up in semantics. Yes, maybe it’s not the point of a primary, strictly speaking. But in terms of gauging voter preferences, and helping to loosen the strangehold of the automatic two party system, I fail to see how that’s a bad thing.

Murc

But in terms of gauging voter preferences, and helping to loosen the strangehold of the automatic two party system, I fail to see how that’s a bad thing.

How do open primaries or jungle primaries do any of those things? These days, an open primary is an invitation to shenanigans, pure and simple. A jungle primary actually entrenches the power of a two-party systems, where it doesn’t actually help make it worse by pressing towards a one-party system. If, say, Rhode Island had a jungle, then the Democratic Party would have even more of a lock on the state than it does now, because now at least a Republican can get on the ballot.

Tom Servo

I too prefer the jungle primary.

That kid in the corner

Call me crazy, but isn’t the jungle system often worse at measuring voter preference in a lot of ways? You can have scenarios where two very similar candidates spoil each other, for instance. Generally, your ideological allies are penalized for every allied candidate that enters the race – however popular your position might be.

If we’re going to have a candidate selection process that weakens the parties – not my preference, but a lot of Americans seem to like it out of sheer disgust, which I get – we could at least have something more accurate than the current system. Maybe IRV? I don’t know how well it works in contests with a ton of candidates, though.

That kid in the corner

As we don’t have a parliamentary system, I’d prefer the California style primary system (I assume that’s what you mean by “jungle primary”) because I think it gets closer to giving you candidates that actually represent what the voters actually want, rather than what the hardcore partisans want in their candidates and forcing voters to figure out which one is the least bad.

It SOUNDS like that should be the outcome, and it was sold to Cali voters as an initiative on that basis: every general election will be a battle of dueling centrists! Whoever wins, we’ll get stuff done at budget time! (This is attractive to Californians in particular b/c of Prop 13’s supermajority requirement, etc.)
But look at how it works: a primary where potentially infinite candidates can run (and each one states party affiliation). The top two vote-getters show up on the general election ballot.

It’s suddenly much harder to move the state Democratic Party leftward, because each additional Democratic candidate for a given office dilutes the vote total of the eventual winner.

Random

I think this is less about Democrats voting in a Republican primary than it is about black people in Mississippi saying no to a noxious neo-Confederate who was trying to organize outside PACs to suppress their vote.

So more power to them. Also the open primary seems to have worked in this instance as a moderating force in US politics in a place where it was needed. Also, fuck McDaniels and teatards in general.

witless chum

In Michigan the political parties don’t have elections, the state does. That means we all get to play.

slimslowslider

The comments are Dreher’s thing are fantastic.

NonyNony

I’m not getting out of the boat. If you’d like to provide a selection of mangoes that’s fine, but I’m not getting out of the boat.

sharculese

Half of Dreher’s commenters think they’re the second coming of Edmund Burke and the other half think they’re Chesterton. It is the ur-fountain of faux-erudite sociopathy, but super tedious to read.

Karen

His commenters adore the phrases “would seem” and “would appear” when used to mean simply “is” or “appears.” They also never met a Latinate malaprop they didn’t love. It’s a master class in pretentious bad writing.

sharculese

Is that dude who signs every post ‘your servant’ still there? He was always favorite of Rod’s stable of sycophantic pretend philosophers.

I now recall that my college Spanish teacher told us that the appropriately flowery abbreviation was “sssqlblp”, expanding to “su seguro servidor que le besa los pies” (or “los manos” for a touch less bathos). Dunno how current that is, though.

ajay

I prefer the French equivalent of “please would you accept, sir, this assurance of my most distinguished sentiments”.

Hogan

It amused me to learn that that’s how Sherman signed his letters to the Atlanta authorities telling them that if the civilians didn’t clear out toot sweet, they might end up, as Terry Pratchett would say, warm for the rest of their lives.

DrS

Oh, bless his heart.

Manny Kant

But that’s just how 19th century people signed letters. I don’t think it was really a statement of any kind.

Hogan

I know. But most 19th century letters aren’t telling the recipient that you’re about to burn down his house, so he best get a move on. It’s kind of jarring.

Medicine Man

He was a pretty hard man. Didn’t shy away or apologize from the villainy of what he was about to do.

He was still around the last time I checked, which was a couple moths ago. Dreher isn’t funny or outrageous enough for me to seek his mangoes very often.

sharculese

I used to gawk at his outburst back when I still read Larison. Then I realized there were only so many ways to point out that bombing the Middle East into oblivion is a stupid idea and gawking at Rod and world’s worst fake hipster Jordan Bloom was bad for my mental health.

sharculese

To clarify, I would keep seeing his post headlines in the sidebar and think ‘that sounds too crazy not to find out what it is.’

Brandon

Hard to top this gem:

I’m a Magnolia state mother of eight, orthodox Bible believer, and constitutionalist, whose vote was stolen today by liberal thuggery.

While in line to vote, I was heartbroken and horrified to see dozens of overweight, thuggish, obscenity spouting, “free styling” liberal Democrats in line to participate in our — in my — conservative primary.

It was an act of theft. They mugged conservative Mississippi.

I tried to stop them. I approached a particularly loud group of horrible youths and quietly, politely, gently asked them if they knew what the Tenth Amendment was. Or the proper boundaries of the Commerce Clause.

They exploded with mockery and hate. Sneered that they didn’t know nothing about no m—–f—– Constitution, cuz all they cared about were gettin their gubmint bennies. They start “singing” and free styling about their cherished bennies.

TeArs in my eyes, I quietly told them that this was a Republican primary for Republicans, and that what they were doing was wrong.

They started yowling that I was a “racist.” They cursed me. Called me unspeakable names.

I’ve never known such despair. We tried to take back our country. Our state. But liberal thugs stole our party and forced a Conservative party to nominate a hideous liberal and his pork and bennies.

Conservatives cannot save our near ruined land through elections. I don’t see how we can. I think we have to prayerfully, but manfully, pursue other options to restore our country back to us.

What happened yesterday was an act of theft. A Conservative party was raped by liberals.

You say that as if it’s a good thing, rather than another problem with a system that deems anyone who merely achieves the biological age of 18 to be competent to have a say in how and by whom the state should be run. There should be not only literacy tests, but basic civics tests of competency, before one is granted a license to vote. One needs a license to drive. and can’t legally drink a beer in this puritanical country until 21, but any uneducated 18 year-old illiterate can help decide who will occupy the highest political offices in the land! Something is very out of whack with a political ideology that thinks this is a sensible way for a society to be governed.

Brandon

Eh, plenty of reactionaries are anti-democratic at heart.

ChrisTS

Ah, yes. I so often encounter those horrible. loud blahs announcing their demands for ‘bennies.’

Good grief.

Brandon

I can imagine that actually happening, but only because they’re deliberating trolling racist white conservatives who are going to assume they’re all on the government plantation anyway.

wjts

“And then one of the youths carved a backwards ‘B’ into my face with a switchblade he borrowed from the Teamster thug who was there as part of the UN ‘observation force’. He then used that same switchblade to cut a baby from the belly of the pregnant woman behind me, screaming all the while that ‘she shoulda had a abortion because there are too many honkies. Black Power!’. Then he sacrificed the unborn baby to Satan. And also Dracula was there.”

Jonestown

Then at that very moment a brave patriotic Navy Seal who was there because he was on break between assignments and decided to vote went up to the liberal democrats and asked them why they were voting and they all shrieked “for the bennies!” and the brave Navy Seal said “God could not be here to prevent this illegal expansion of the electorate so I am here to do it for Him” and he cold cocked them all.

DrS

I thought he was a Marine

cleter

Well, now you know how the rest of us felt when five conservative justices picked the president that one time. Boo hoo.

NS

To me, this primary just underscores how divided the nation is; as a Northener the politics are just completely inscrutable to me–it might as well have been a race in a foreign country. What would motivate some one in either camp?

Random

North or South you should be able to understand “it makes people mad when you try to suppress their vote”.

Tyto

For all values of “suppress” that include no actual or practical impediment–at all–to exercise of the franchise.

Aimai

This comment that “as a northerner” you “can’t understand the politics” of this is just the most bizarre piece of bullshit you’ve peddled here so far in a string of bullshit posts. It is literally impossible that this can be true, whether you are a right wing northernor or a liberal northerner there is absolutely nothign new about people crossing party line to vote for a lesser of two evils candidate.

Malaclypse

The moment that Jennie said post-cantor that the teabaggers were an unbeatable force, this was pretty much inevitable.

sharculese

Jenny hit his peak when he declared that House teabaggers were definitely going to stage an illegal coup and oust John Boehner to prevent him from re-opening the government, and that he knew this because some people were talking about it on the radio.

I know peak wingnut is a lie, but wingnut is infinite and Jenny is a very limited man.

Cantor lost because Cantor had his eyes focused upwards, not homewards.

This has been a horrendous electoral season for Teabaggers. They are literally dead on arrival this November.

NonyNony

Cantor lost because Cantor had his eyes focused upwards, not homewards.

Yup. Also because he is a giant asshole. And because he idiotically spent a lot of money on campaign commercials instead of GOTV. (Why would you give millions of dollars in free airtime to your opponent who can’t afford to buy his own commercials? I know – because your campaign “consultants” get kickbacks from TV airtime they purchase on your behalf but not for GOTV activities. Still – it’s a stupid move to broadcast to the low-info voters in your own party that there’s an alternative to voting for you if your opponent doesn’t have the money to do it himself.)

cpinva

“Also because he is a giant asshole.”

in fairness to cantor, he’s always been a giant asshole, he didn’t just turn into one over the last two years.

Tom Servo

JenBob is Kristol.

NonyNony

I doubt it. JenBob’s rantings are far more fun to read than anything ever written by Bill Kristol.

Ken

I realize that this is any of several horror movie tropes, but: Have we seen JenBob lately?

Cochran was supported by the state Teabaggers, but not that national ones, like Cruz and Palin.

This was Mississippi conservatives refudiating even that outside interference.

Incontinentia Buttocks

You can understand McDaniel’s anger. Forty-nine years after the Voting Rights Act, the Mississippi GOP had managed to re-engineer the all-white primary, and then Cochran was ungentlemanly enough to lure the ni…. uh, “liberal Democrats” into voting for him.

RobertL

So a mother of eight wants to pursue things “manfully”?

I’d like a see that!

DrS

Not that I don’t think that’s all a crock of bull, but my grandma, fdr democrat and mother of 14, was tougher than any man I ever met.

cpinva

ok, I know this is late and all, but I have a question, more directed at the lawyer types on here.:

I have read/heard reference made to a MS law that states, roughly, that you have to vote in the general election, for whoever you voted for in the primary. aside from the issue of how would you actually enforce such a law, is the law itself even constitutional? it’s the state telling you who you must vote for in the general election, if you voted in one of the primaries. I kind of thought (oh silly me!) that the whole idea of voting privately, was to enable you to vote for whoever you wanted to vote for, not who the state said you must vote for.

did I miss the memo?

wjts

I am not a law-talking guy, but this Gawker article informs me that there is a law on the books in Mississippi that reads, “No person shall be eligible to participate in any primary election unless he intends to support the nominations made in the primary in which he participates,” which strikes me as slightly less enforceable than, “No person employed as a costermonger or riverboat pilot shall think disparaging thoughts about the moon.” Some folks might also be making misguided reference to a perfectly sensible and enforceable law that prohibits someone who voted in one party’s first primary election from voting in another party’s subsequent runoff election.

ajay

That is a bizarre and unenforceable law and might even (IANAL) go against voting rights law. Apart from anything else, it’s perfectly reasonable to have a situation where you might prefer Democrat 1 to Republican to Democrat 2, so you vote in the Democrat primary for D1, he doesn’t get in, so you decide to vote R instead.